Teamsters understand the value in union membership. Higher pay, better benefits, and a greater voice in the workplace are standards set by union members that won’t be given up without a fight, even after the Supreme Court’s decision in the “Janus v. AFSCME” case.

While it is true that this ruling may create temporary roadblocks, public employees throughout the United States need to remain unified. We cannot allow the progress working people have made in union to be slowed down because of lawsuits that disregard the value of public employees.

The Janus decision came about because anti-employee forces spent millions of dollars on lobbying and court challenges for over 40 years. Attacks from these outside groups, backed by secret donors, seek to eliminate the freedom of public employees to negotiate with their employer over the value of their work.

Many Teamster members around the country have held conversations with their co-workers about the impact of the Supreme Court decision to reinforce the value of remaining unified. Whether at the worksite or at the ballot box, members are fighting back against these attacks.

Public sector Teamsters have made it their career to serve their country and community, and any attempt to take away their freedom to join together is an attack on those who are the foundation of America.

Our middle class was built by everyday working people, standing together in union. The Teamsters honor that history by continuing the fight to give working people the promise of the American dream.

That won’t end with the Janus decision. The Teamsters will continue to organize, mobilize, and do whatever is necessary to achieve prosperity through collective action.

XPO Logistics is a top ten global logistics and transportation company with annual revenue of $15 billion and 89,000 employees, another 10,000 workers classified as independent contractors, and thousands more working for firms that subcontract with XPO. We are the REAL workers at XPO Logistics worldwide exposing the truth about the company’s global greed, illegal wage theft, unsafe conditions, and abhorrent and vicious anti-worker, anti-union tactics.

This greed includes mistreating former Con-way Freight workers in the United States who are being kept in the dark about terminal closures and layoffs, and the company’s illegal refusal to bargain contracts and denying their workers’ federally protected right to organize. It also includes port, rail and last-mile drivers around the country and in Southern California fighting wage theft in excess of $200 million because they are misclassified as independent contractors and denied the right to form their union. This greed has caused numerous lawsuits and strikes. Greed also means an unsafe workplace and mistreating its warehouse employees.

XPO’s greed extends to Europe beginning with breaking its promise to not layoff any workers for at least 18 months. French workers and the unions have been fighting back against XPO’s disrespect, lies and attempts to slash jobs. Similar struggles are taking place in Great Britain, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, and across Europe.

Join the worldwide struggle now! Get involved with this campaign by joining the Facebook group “XPO Exposed.”

Together, we can eXPOse the company’s global greed and win fairness, respect and dignity for tens of thousands of XPO employees around the world!

Workers’ pensions are being endangered by both Congress and those charged with overseeing them. The Teamsters and our members are standing united to say “No!” to cuts and “Yes!” to greater retirement security!

The ‘Let’s Get America Working!’ campaign seeks to restore a dynamic and prosperous middle class to drive economic growth by helping to advance policy decisions that create and maintain good middle-income jobs, guarantee retirement security, expand access to the American Dream, and ensure that the benefits of the ongoing economic recovery are felt by the many, not just the few.

This webpage provides information on the Teamsters Union’s legislative advocacy at both the federal and state level as well as our field activity to support those policy positions and to get strong labor candidates elected to office. Among other resources, you will find our federal legislative scorecard, formal statements of policy position and communications to Capitol Hill, a weekly update on federal legislative happenings, an overview of bills we are tracking at the state level, and quick links to take action on priority issues.

This web page provides information on the ongoing effort to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Since 1994, NAFTA has devastated working families, putting corporate profits ahead of people. What’s worse is that NAFTA has become the blueprint for all other trade agreements, from the way that it was negotiated in secret, to the bad provisions that have made their way into every agreement that has been signed since then. Now, NAFTA is being renegotiated and we demand that it be reframed to work for workers instead of corporate interests.

The Teamsters have stood in solidarity with worker struggles in other countries since our founding. With economic globalization, our ability to organize increasingly depends on our ability to build alliances with workers on a global scale.
More than ever, Teamsters are organizing and bargaining with multi-national companies. A key objective of our Global Strategies Campaign is to build strong alliances with unions around the globe who organize and bargain with common employers. Our focus is on workers in the emerging global supply chains – the infrastructure of globalization.
Globalization creates new opportunities for international worker solidarity. We seek common cause with workers around the world to build social justice for all workers and the communities in which they live.

For a period of 40 years, something managed to keep inequality in check in the United States. From 1940 to 1980, the richest 1 percent took home 9 percent of the wealth generated by the economy. Today, just as they did in the 1920s, the top 1 percent grabs about double that share. Surprisingly, the cause of this midcentury “Great Compression” has been largely neglected by economists, with many of them casually dismissing the role of unions.

One influential theory, especially among pundits, is that the supply of skilled workers curbed the growth of income inequality. Starting in the 1940s, the argument goes, the increasing education of the American workforce propelled a broad prosperity. Another recent account, associated with the economist Thomas Piketty, maintains that the devastation of World War II drove down the returns on capital.

But a groundbreaking new paper, “Unions and Inequality Over the Twentieth Century: New Evidence From Survey Data,” written by the economists Henry Farber, Dan Herbst, Ilyana Kuziemko, and Suresh Naidu, proposes a different engine for that broad prosperity: unions. The growth of union membership—to a height of nearly 30 percent in 1955, before falling to its current low of 10.7 percent—explains the Great Compression every bit as much as theories about education or any other single factor.

It may surprise some readers that economists consider the statement “unions help workers” a revelation akin to discovering general relativity. (Another recent finding, “where you grow up matters,” has also shaken the economics establishment to its core.) But economists haven’t had the necessary data to study unions in any depth. Detailed data on education goes back to the 1940s, but the government only introduced questions tracking union status in 1973. Yet the authors of “Unions and Inequality” newly applied a Gallup data set that allowed them to analyze workers back to the 1930s.

Before this paper, economists generally believed that unions largely helped the most skilled and educated workers—i.e., those who already had higher wages. Many economists insisted that unions work by creating insiders who benefit at the expense of outsiders—in other words, those who get in the union receive a premium, while those outside the union are denied opportunities. This theory implies that, since unions merely transfer wealth among workers, they wouldn’t lower inequality overall and might even slow economic growth. But the new paper pushes back on all these notions.

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It turns out that, at their peak, unions were disproportionately made up of the least-skilled workers and people of color. Historians continue to debate how racially segregated unions were in this period, but this new research finds that nonwhites became more likely than whites to be in a union starting in the early 1940s, and that this trend continued until the late 1970s. (People of color also received a higher union premium.) This rise in union membership among people of color begins around 1941, when President Franklin Roosevelt desegregated the defense industry with Executive Order 8802, a move designed to stop a march on Washington planned by civil-rights leaders. As Suresh Naidu, one of the paper’s authors, told The Nation, “Starting around World War II, labor unions became no more likely to be white than the labor market as a whole. Union households would go on to become less likely to be white up and through the civil-rights movement.”

Most economists have also been wrong about unions and wealth distribution. If unions were largely about helping insiders at the expense of outsiders, they wouldn’t bring down every indicator of economic inequality—but that’s what happened with the Gini coefficient, the 90-to-10 ratio, and the rest of the jargon-heavy measures of inequality. The paper also reveals that decreasing inequality doesn’t reduce economic growth: The researchers couldn’t find a single model in which the economy slowed because of a high union share.

These results should end the simplistic tales in which education alone challenges the dominance of the 1 percent. If we want to change whom our economy works for, we must change who gets to exercise power. And this paper makes it clear: There is power in a union.